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Jason Koebler (3528235) writes "Adam Steltzner, the lead engineer on the NASA JPL's Curiosity rover mission, believes that to send humans to distant planets, we may need to do one of two things: look for ways to game space-time—traveling through wormholes and whatnot—or rethink the fundamental idea of 'ourselves.' 'Our best bet for space exploration could be printing humans, organically, on another planet,' said Steltzner."

I think there's a case to be made that genetically being human is far less important to being "human" than the shared culture we've developed. Organically laying out a clone of yourself is far less like yourself than raising an adopted child. This kind of program, while inspired, and theoretically plausible, doesn't actually achieve what we want to achieve.

I think there's a case to be made that genetically being human is far less important to being "human" than the shared culture we've developed. Organically laying out a clone of yourself is far less like yourself than raising an adopted child. This kind of program, while inspired, and theoretically plausible, doesn't actually achieve what we want to achieve.

It's plausible in the sense that no fundamental laws are violated. It isn't like time-travel or true perpetual motion - it's just an engineering challenge. An impossibly hard engineering challenge, true. One that may take centuries to solve. But still, it's plausible.

No, they are not biologically identical. They are genetically identical. The development of the brain isn't just influenced by genetics - environmental factors play a part, an there's a strongly chaotic element allowing for miniscule influences to have a dramatic effect.

You could copy a person - but you'd need to get every neuron, every synapse done perfectly. Right down to neurotransmitter generation rates and receptor concentration, and probably a few things we don't even know about yet. Such a thing is f

That limited definition of "clone" has recently been widely adopted simply because it is currently within reach. A full clone would be a full copy of yourself, with every neuron in place. Full cloning seems like the only rationale for "printing" people, since otherwise it would be much easier to send a frozen embryo in an artificial uterus with robot-mom to raise him/her.

A. You couldn't actually produce identical biomechanical states in any meaningful capacity. The bandwidth requirement alone would be stupidly large.B. If you did have such an ability, biological mechanisms would continue to flow while you built "me", which result in some very very nasty artifacts. You can't bathe in the same river twice.

I suppose full cloning is silly, since mind-uploading seems both more technically feasible (or rather, somewhat less technically infeasible?) and also more advantageous if "you" are going into a different habitat.

I suppose the bigger issue is that nobody but you cares whether it is you who goes, or another equally qualified individual. And the most qualified individual is sure to be one of our ancestors or creations, not any one of us reading this.

By "printing" I'm assuming they mean to duplicate the template person entirely - including memories. That tech might not exist today, and we might never be able to, but if we could, it would certainly work great for this.

Depending on the data size it might be feasible to store the templates of a few dozen individuals. Half male, half female. All the varying skillsets. Send out a few hundred probes that would systematically search star systems and if it finds an uninhabited one that could sustain human l

Aside from the whole organic-3D-printing-of-entire-humans angle, this isn't a new idea. Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth [wikipedia.org] features an extraterrestrial colony of humans descended from machine-grown progenitors.

The article doesn't actually describe anything similar to 3D printing either. The justification for calling it that is pretty much: 3D printing involves assembling a final product from raw materials; the proposal also involves assembling a final product from raw materials; therefore we're talking about 3D printing.

In general the idea is interesting -- although it's hardly new, and we're so far from the technology level required to do it that it's still in the realm of science fiction -- but the 3D printing

Heck, you could describe a fetus developing in the womb as 3D printing - you're feeding raw materials into a biological device that essentially prints itself.

The author of the article isn't about transferring consciousness, so "all you need" is a way to to encode the genome (doable), a way to transmit this encoding (also doable), a way to construct artificially a zygote using this genetic information (uh...), and then an artificial womb a la The Matrix to gestate the embryo. Also robots to raise the child

Yep, heck theoretically you should be able to fit some sperm and eggs in a small enough container and transport that. The real issue which we are pretty close to solving in an artificial womb.

Of course you would also need some type of nano-bot self constructing army to build a habitat and laboratory, ultimately that probably a bigger challenge than the cloning itself.

Yeah, I guess we currently have the tech to freeze eggs & sperm indefinitely, so that would solve that. I don't think you'd need the nanobots, regular macro-scale robots could handle it with prefab components and equipment.

Aside from the whole organic-3D-printing-of-entire-humans angle, this isn't a new idea. Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth [wikipedia.org] features an extraterrestrial colony of humans descended from machine-grown progenitors.

There's also Greg Egan's fascinating short story Glory.A tiny anti-matter powered package traveling at near light speed is sent to an exo-planetary system.That's used as a seed to generate humans + technology using data sent electromagnetically.http://outofthiseos.typepad.co... [typepad.com] (And it's in the 25th Year's Best Science Fiction)

I thought that was the basic concept. Spend 500 years traveling, and when you arrive, print out a bunch of 20-30 year old scientists, engineers, mechanics, etc. to start building the colony. Once you've printed a large enough group to be viable, they can make more the old fashioned way.

You don't have to print humans, just synthesize a memorized genome and throw it into an artificial womb. Done to death in SciFi literature and certainly within the means of 21th century technology. It's certainly interesting if a human raised entirely by a computer can really qualify as human.

And why do it ? Just to spread the human disease in the universe ? Why not simply send the artificial intelligence that is necessary anyway to make such a mission a success ?

I can just see it. A billion years from now, on a planet a trillion miles away, the last remaining message from the human race will be displayed in black pixelated letters on a small rectangular display: PC LOAD LETTER.

I don't know if printing is the right word. I think making test tube babies that are then raised by some kind of AI to be more or less human might be the closest we get. There is still a lot of technology that we need for that (artificial womb, an AI that would simulate some kind of social interaction) .

Most people would not go on a journey if they knew they had to spend the rest of their lives and next 500 generations' lives on that same journey.

Yeah, but how much of it is meaningful. It's not as though every atom in your body needs to be precisely position, not even every cell. Heck, it's entirely possible that most of the tissues outside the nervous system wouldn't need to be placed all that accurately.

You don't need to describe a human on the molecular level. For the most part, go with the organ level, and you're all set. Once we can print replacement organs, it's just a small step to putting it all together for a complete person. You'll need compatible DNA to match the cells that you're printing.

The only big deal is the brain, as you probably want to print a person with memory and skills, so you have to be able to scan a live person and then print a duplicate.

Old story from way back; a building has been found on the moon that contains a machine that kills people in many different ways throughout the strange building but always consistently. Almost like a mouse in a maze, the scientists figure out that if they can get through this death trap and map each method of death along the way they should be able to get further each time and eventually manage to travel out the other side. Of course it could take many lives to accomplish this so they devise a method of teleporting a copy of someone from the earth to the moon and taking a "backup" copy that shares memories with their counterpart so that when that doppelganger dies there is still a version left alive earth-side.

The only problem is that the sheer horror of each death causes the surviving copy to be driven insane, the human mind just not able to cope, that is until they find the reckless Al Barker who's courted death all his life. It's only then that the research makes any headway.

After reading all comments so far and thinking of the concerns mentioned, printing humans onto another world for colonising purposes is really not a fearful thing to do. I will illustrate the simplicity of it by starting with artificial insemination and sperm donation. There is a sperm pool out of which we draw readymade zoids to fecund with an egg in an ovary, when we determine there is a need to do so. In the end, it all boils down to this bare fact.

Well if we are using sperm and egg then we really need to develop robot parents that have strong AI modelled after ourselves to take care of the children and raise them as best they can. Send along all the accumulated knowledge we can, and hope for the best. Long term they probably wouldn't turn out too much different from ourselves. Even if the first few generations were really messed up.

Sadly I agree to that. Yet let's be optimistic. After all, we can say we have achieved some level of accuracy when we will boast that yes yes, it is really us, in all respects, that has colonised that world. We come as a package across the Universe.

We're probably a lot closer to replacing our bodies with mechanical equivalents than we are to printing a complete person. The biggest challenge is the brain. If you replace everything surrounding the brain with prosthetics, then it may be much more practical to suspend the function of the brain for a long voyage than it would be for a whole body.

Or combine the ideas. Freeze a brain in a cyborg body. When you get a colony set up, print a uterus, implant frozen embryos, and then let the cyborg parent the

the idea of consciousness is the main problem with simply printing humans with a specific memory. if you copy someone with their current memory... the copy is now a new person, with his own actions. the main body and the new body have completely separate life after creation. if the original dies, the new one carries on. the idea of copying someone to teleport them is unsolvable before we figure out how to deal with consciousness, because that isnt 'me' on the other side, that is someone else who looks like

Using the current state of Ink Jet printing costs as a benchmark, I'm sure the cost of the cartridges will *far* surpass the cost of the printer any mission to send them to another planet. It will probably be cheaper to simply buy enough humans to make the trip and keep them in storage to use as-needed.

Coming to terms with what it might be to actually be human... printing ourselves and transferring a back-up to that body...what does that mean? will consciousness go with it?

To me, consciousness is probably just an electronic current that holds us to our memory. The terrifying moment, even if I could replicate myself elsewhere, is,"What happens when I sever that connection and transfer over/" will I just die and a perfect copy keeps living on just as I was a moment ago, or do I go with it? *could anyone tell*? It is the stuff not just of the fear of death, but no one ever knowing that makes it a nightmare.

The Star Trek transporters are clearly murder factories. However, a proper quantum state teleporter would not allow duplication, and it is possible that the consciousness would travel too. Then again, it might not, and there is no way to tell.

You joke, but you've happened on a good point. By the time we have the technology to conjure life into existence anywhere in the galaxy, why bother with humans? Surely we'll be able to make bodies that are much more suited for the universe beyond Earth.

I wish that people that are very, very smart on one particular subject or discipline would be a little more careful before they speak on matters outside of their area of expertise, especially on stuff as outlandish as what this particular individual has suggested.

I had an interesting conversation with a man that develops re-entry systems and the test-beds used to develop and test them. He was very down-to-earth on the costs associated with launching materiel; basically in his mind it was not practical at this point to enact the scenario that Kim Stanley Robinson created in his Mars trilogy. We don't have the launch payload capacity. We don't have the landing zone accuracy. Even the concept of the kind of machinery needed to create habitable environments on Mars is too great to budget for and the machinery itself is too hard to maintain without a support structure for that maintenance. We won't be operating D9 bulldozers on other planets.

It also came up that our country spent 4% of GDP in getting to the Moon six times. 4% of GDP let twelve men walk on the surface of another body for a few days. Without a nemesis country like the Soviet Union provided for us, there's no interest in committing any real money to getting us even back to the Moon, let alone to other planets.

For many short sighted people, a nemesis is required, but for smarter people, we need to expand beyond Earth. The general rule of thumb is to have at least one offsite back-up. Life destroying things Earth wide catastrophic events tend to happen once very so often, and we're coming due.

Why would we? It makes no sense to think in terms of Earth-style construction; instead, just pick a small shallow crater and give it a transparent airtight roof (think partial geodesic dome, sort of a buried Quonset hut assembled on-site), preferably but not necessarily using local minerals to form the bulk of the concrete used to anchor it to the crater. Bam, you have "Habitat 1.0", good for a few weeks with canned air until the plants start growing

The whole "glass dome over a crater" thing is as much sci-fi as warp drive at this point. The material technology just doesn't exist and might not for a long time. It might be more appropriate for "Habitat 3.0", but it will require an established industrial infrastructure. The most likely scenario for "Habitat 1.0" is a smaller concrete dome. Look up "magnesium oxychloride cement". It can be made from magnesium chloride and water, and it will cure in the Martian atmosphere. Yes, I have tried it in a vacuum chamber and it can work.

Check out any S&M/B&D club. The people there are all going "no please, no master", but it's all consensual because if they really want it to stop there's a safe-word, and when that's said, it really does stop.

With a robot, easy enough to program it to say no, and even resist slightly, but there's no safe-word, since after all, it's a robot.

Yup, you'd need some *serious* nanotechnology to be able to print functioning cells, and you'd have to know the wiring of a brain to the subcellular (probably molecular) level to make it work. Not within the next 30 years.

These are the people we have heading up space exploration? Sounds like he's more suited for making low budget sci-fi movies. Seriously, this kind of tech is so far beyond our capabilities it doesn't even pay to bring it up in a serious conversation.

Sure it does. Let's say that cryo-stasis ships (which might become feasible soon due to shashimi technology) or Generation Ships are fundamentally flawed (for whatever reason) but that 3d printing people or using wormholes could be feasible some day.

Just QFT since many folks severely downscore AC. The moral issue there is the one that Trek skirts with its analog process - whether digital copy-and-delete is equivalent to move, when considering lifeforms.